Page 80 - JohnMcQueenFolio

McQueen wrote about this work, created for an exhibition, Blue/Green: color, code, context, in 2018: McQueen says: “The title Real describes two aspects of the work. First, the colors blue and green are the most abundant colors in our world. One only has to think of the green earth and the blue oceans and sky. To symbolize this, I chose one of the most abundant ma- terials in our everyday existence. Though we are not all that conscious of it, plastic containers are everywhere in our daily lives. We are burying ourselves in them without seeing them. We are after what they hold and discount the holder itself. They come into and out of our lives as if they were never there. Yet, they are real.
Secondly, the subject matter is also real. Landscape is always in our lives. It can’t help but be. It is all around us. In this piece, it is vertical and very flat; something that usually doesn’t happen in normal depictions of landscapes. This comes from the Chinese tradition of painting huge mountains with extremely small inhabitants almost lost somewhere in the composition. This is in contrast to the way the West believes humans rule the world and can do what we please.”